This blog will highlight key EPM market trends, recent events and other news of interest to our field, customers and partners.

Planning at the Speed of Business with Hyperion Planning on Oracle Exalytics

Oracle’s corporate strategy is based on simplifying IT and powering innovation for our customers. As part of that, we recently announced a series of new Oracle In-Memory Applications and released several white papers focusing on how Oracle Engineered Systems can help customers run their business processes without constraints.In the world of enterprise planning, this includes implementing best practices like driver-based rolling forecasts, “tapping into the wisdom of crowds” in the forecasting process, and aligning financial and operational planning.While customers strive to actually implement these best practices, system constraints often get in the way.In fact, in a study done by Dynamic Markets for Oracle in 2011, a staggering 95% of respondents said they encountered problems with their current planning systems, especially around data, timeliness and analyzing different scenarios.

Deploying Oracle Hyperion Planning on the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine changes the game by delivering some remarkable performance capabilities at lower cost than ever before possible.In-memory technology can dramatically accelerate analytic performance and enable more innovative decision-making.Exalytics drives a new class of smarter and more powerful analytic applications that simply weren’t possible using conventional planning software and generic hardware configurations.

Consider the following results from early customer benchmarks:

+ 5X to 100X faster interactivity, leading to better decisions and accuracy

+ 6X to 10X faster planning cycles

+ 5X reduction in server footprint, resulting in lower TCO

So what does this mean for you?It means you can more feasibly address the new realities of today’s planning environment.You can speed up your planning and forecasting processes, while planning in more detail and for more users across the organization. Moreover, you can extend planning beyond Finance, run more complex planning models, and ultimately increase your forecast accuracy.Improvements in forecast accuracy translate into substantial business value – industry analysts estimate that even a nominal 3% improvement in accuracy could drive as much a 2% gain in profit margins.And isn’t increasing business value what Finance is all about?

For more information about Oracle Hyperion Planning and EPM applications running on Oracle Exalytics, you can find the new whitepapers on oracle.com here: